Can short lists facilitate the collection of data on diagnosis, intervention and presenting issue in community health and outpatient care services?

Introduction NSW Health is undertaking the community health and outpatient care information project (CHOCIP), which will develop a patient level data collection across all community health and outpatient care services in NSW. It is the largest project of its type ever attempted in Australia and, when complete, will result in the collection of some 25 million unit records describing the services provided in community health and outpatient care settings. A key CHOCIP sub-project is to develop short lists, in consultation with clinicians, that represent the 10–20 most common values in the data domain for the data elements diagnosis, intervention and presenting issue for each of the defined 130 service types in community health and outpatient care. The reason for the development of these short lists is to avoid the use of clinical coders to retrospectively code the three data elements.